Writers
Posts tagged 2012
Poem: Higher Mother
0Dominique Larntz * May 9, 2012
Higher Mother
There’s no one to blame
but my stress started in the womb.
I have only begun to mother myself
and I am amazed at how much more
nurturing I still need to receive
from the wiser parts of my life.
The rush of scheduled achievements
has been a distraction—a stoppage—
from true growth.
Poem: Conversation with the Corporate Manager
0Dominique Larntz * May 8, 2012
Conversation with the Corporate Manager
“It’s broken.”
“Well, what did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you try this? Did you try that?”
“Yes.”
“Did you call him? Did you call her?”
“Sure.”
“Did you follow the procedure?”
“The procedure is unclear.”
“What could be unclear about it? It’s right there in writing?”
“You could read it two different ways.”
“Weren’t you in last week’s conference call,
when corporate said we would read it the way they say?”
“I think I recall.”
“You should remember. That’s what we pay you for.”
“What do you want me to do about this broken thing now?”
“Fix it.”
“Can I use my corporate credit card?”
“Of course not! There’s a freeze on credit card usage!”
“How do I get a replacement then?”
“Fill out an equipment request,
and I’ll run it up the food chain
to see if I can get it approved
by my manager
and my manager’s manager.
Once I get it approved
we have to order it from our special
vendor in Costa Rica.
We have a contract with them.
Finally, what’s the cost
of the replacement part?”
“Two dollars.”
Poem: This Morning
0Dominique Larntz * May 5, 2012
This Morning
My tears ran with the shower
while I contemplated our conversation
about the environmental scientists
who committed suicide because they’ve
deduced an impending cataclysm so hopeless
they decided they did not want to live through it.
These small droplets of compassion from my naked body
during its daily ritual that feels like rebirth to my mind
each time I hear the faucet engage
will end at the same place all water ends.
Tears will travel through pipes provided
by people who have achieved such wonders in
engineering that even I, with a tiny house
and a small schedule, can take for granted
a shower in the desert this morning.
Poem: Moonrise
0Dominique Larntz * May 4, 2012
Moonrise
Such a pregnant moon holds the souls of last week’s suicides
and I can hear the earth whisper that she misses them.
What hopeless creature attaches itself to the backs
of the type who cannot still themselves to wait until it passes?
Suicide is a pest; a spiritual species that travels around
waiting for a host body to identify with it. When it moves through,
if you feel its claws take hold of your anxiety like you might
take hold of a puppet–just rest and wait.
If it doesn’t kill you, the rule seems to be
despair and hopelessness must move along,
like the moonset and sunset.
Poem: Grace
0Dominique Larntz * May 3, 2012
Grace
A cat purrs
not only when she’s
properly petted,
but when she’s
deeply threatened.
My heart flourishes
not only within the wet
landscapes of youth,
but during these desert years
when the next visit
to a full well
is uncertain.
Poem: Transplant
0Dominique Larntz * April 30, 2012
Transplant
The dry soil absorbed me as quickly
as the drops of Lady Gray tea
slopped from the side of my cup
while I leaned the opposite way
to feed the lemon thyme Shauna
gave me for my birthday–
the perfect fit to replant
in the stands we made
just outside our front door.
My eyes kaleidoscope
on the radiance
of the escaped sky.
In its heated airways,
Summer is sending its missives
each day now, announcing itself
by thrilling our skin into moistening
and making intimate embers
where we are bare.
I know Summer will bring baking heat.
I will tend the garden,
tend myself and my frailties,
the skin that burns too fast,
the sense a transplant has
that it wants to wind its way
back down to sea level
and find a way home to the ocean.
I am as impermanent
as anything else
and the desert
is one of the most
skillful teachers
to plant the idea
that we all root
in foreign soil
for a while.
Poem: Crater Lake
0Dominique Larntz * April 29, 2012
Crater Lake
Crater Lake Blue could be bottled
and then I could hold onto stillness with them—
my grandfather and my uncle.
When I talk to my grandfather now
through the gauze of Alzheimer’s,
I am no longer asking him if the travel
trinket I am buying is too expensive.
When I talk to my uncle through
the twisted lips of drug arrests
we don’t mention when we see
each other once per decade,
I can only thank him for teaching
me how to drive stick-shift
in South Dakota parking lots
when I was sixteen.
My moment with them was at Crater Lake,
swirling my sweaty hair up into
a knot at the center of my skull
and I felt safe with them on the road north
through California for a few days
in the middle of a chaotic childhood
but I was probably bored
and I had no idea it was important
to the forty-two year old woman I would become
who needed to know that at the heart
of each fractured person—
of each person who falls beyond cliffs
from which they can no longer send us
words we can decipher—there is a deep crater
of being that is as alive as the earth.
We don’t have to communicate in language
to love our families; we can sit together or
if we can’t sit together we can use their
illness as an opportunity to ask for help
or to help others whose faces remind us of theirs—to
widen the very concept of family
until we learn that there will be no saving
ourselves or each other. There will only be
a deeper, an ever deepening, cratering, caring
that pools in our spirits for us to gaze into
when we need space.
Poem: It Has Been Too Loud For Too Long
0Dominique Larntz * April 17, 2012
It has been loud for too long
I invite quiet into our space again
for a long visit.
Imagine him walking through
our curved front door with his
traveling bag that holds
the tender smell of silence.
He eases open the clasps
so we can pass it around
with the smiles loved ones give
to sacred treasures as we enjoy them.
You can feel yourself enter silence
like you slip into cotton sheets
or into wonderful sandals.
Let profound peace be my brother
who knows he is welcome in my home;
who knows he is loved here.
Poem: Arrival
0Dominique Larntz * April 12, 2012
Arrival
On this birthday, death exhales his musings
into my carotid pattern and I wonder
if it is as stable as ever. I am in the middle–
this precipice point where I have let go
of the potentials of birth and I have begun
to embrace the vague details of death.
I care less and less about celebrating
the day of my entrance into this body,
but the fact remains that it is still marked.
I know the date, the time, the year
and the desert place in which my small fist
leaked out into this mortal blossom.
The date of my demise is unclear.
I might celebrate it in some sort of heaven,
dancing between layers of golden scarves
in a semblance of whatever my spirit
will know to be naked abandon in the afterlife.
There may be appreciation
for this sort of visceral joy.
We may gasp ourselves
into death with a breath
we do not yet know.
We might work ourselves to death
because we are in some sort of
prolonged gestation,
reaching to grow into something spectacular
through life-school–
so that death is another birth.
In the womb of death’s wooing of me,
I am comfortable with the outlines of my mortality today,
stretching into the sky with fingers
that are large to my pupil but tiny to the moon’s eye;
exploring with legs that are huge
compared to the models of my culture
but small compared to the waves of an ocean;
kicking with hips that rotate open
to uncover a chakra base
tunneled into an earth
to sustain me for a long curious life
that for the sun is only the time span
it takes to glance around at its planets
and assure itself they are still there.
Today, I am thinking about people I care for,
primarily the people in my blood family.
I can feel them in the pulse at my neck as I breath.
They are as close to me as my carotid artery
and as far from me as the nearest stars.
I have been writing them secret love letters,
knowing I may leave first.
I hope they arrive.
Poem: Invocation
0Dominique Larntz * April 2, 2012
Invocation
By now we glimpse blossoming colors
opening into the sweet morning air.
May you delight in their dazzling array–
even in this desert, while the dew
sticks to your shoes as you walk from
your front door to your car door,
if those are the only moments you have
to observe them today.
May you rejoice as Winter’s dormancy transitions to renewal.
May you love as the flower opens–
fully, sun-facing, extending trust.
Time again for rebirth, fragrance, eggs, and colors.
May Spring enter your life wholly.
Poem: Bark
0Dominique Larntz * March 29, 2012
Bark
I felt like tree bark this morning,
peeled off and left rotting on the ground.
I could not connect to anything,
no light, no finish, no sparkle, no replenish.
Walked around moving stuff from one place
to another in my house. Not sure if I was
cleaning or replacing where the mess was placed.
Felt overburdened by the tiniest responsibility
because bark has no roots, man,
has no way to sink itself
into the softness of soil other than
through decay and decay is long.
Until at one point I realized this
ink of an emotion is my sentient soul’s
pivot point: I can choose to sink further
and that is a beautiful dark surrender
to depression or I can choose to do
some small act like laundry or invoices–
an act no one but my inner witness
will see and applaud.
My pivot point is so tiny and so daily
but that is the point
where I choose to live or to die.
Poem: Dance
0Dominique Larntz * March 19, 2012
Dance
Why I say nothing publicly:
So you are not caught cold in your mindless mass
of a mess, where you slashed the pad of skin
from the thumb of my outstretched hand
at the end of my arms, slowly curving
together to hold you.
Why I wait long and lovingly:
So you will have the opportunity to understand
and to try to make this right with me
and I may have the chance to help you heal;
therefore I will know my anger with you as a friend
and I will keep my lively conversation stable.
Poem: Still
0Dominique Jones * March 8, 2012
Still
All we do is stay still
in New Mexico and the light moves.
On one March morning I have seen
stillness shift into a hurtling
aluminum zia plate.
And then some trash that blew into
what I call our backyard
(because i live
and take seriously
this time frame
of a human lifetime
and i wave my language
around like tiny wings
in the big wind
and our economics
are like flocks of birds
crying out in the skies
together and my mortgage
is my flute note in that song)
became part of a blizzard flurry
dusting and dazzling the xeriscape like feathers
that squeezed the breath out from my eyes
and for a moment my muscles needed to stop
before the coffee cup reached my lips
and I needed to do nothing but look.
Look at the marvel
of the sudden morning storm.
The power went out and the sound of the wind
touched my ears as it wound
around the house like a ribbon.
I remembered the reports from all the watchers
who reported that the sun has sent excessive flares
today and I imagine its solar arc infecting
my body, my cells, my being
with radiation
and
the facebook post I will offer
if I die from the storm
but not now–not now–because
the power is out
and I am writing by hand
I am watching the evidence of the wind
I am swirling with birds
I am sudden and curling in the March
desert snow against the rocks
and concrete and zia covered steel
that we blanket ourselves with.
Still, I have done nothing.
Poem: Passive Aggressive As I Understand It
0Dominique Larntz * February 20
Passive Aggressive As I Understand It
When aggression supplants moral conscience,
we discover alien life right here on this planet.
O secretly, haven’t you wondered if the enemy
isn’t a different species? Our media croons
to this part of our evil soil, watering the seeds
of our hatred because they say it sells. Our
sellers say that selling is what supports us
because making money is how we survive.
Our money makers make money out of nothing
and then make nothing out of our soil and water
leaving us destitute when before all this aggression
at least we had soil and water. O poison, at least
we have the sun even if our species spits its last
breath in aggression, opening its own stomach
to prove it has been victimized.
Poem: Waking Tune
0Dominique Larntz * February 10, 2012
Waking Tune
I love to listen to the morning–
the rush of thoughts in my mind
like a tide that builds quick footsteps
and then quiets into silence
in the shower.
Then the coffee grinder
along with the bird that shouldn’t be
here just after Candlemas.
I wouldn’t expect him until Spring.
Poem: Injury Roadsong
0Dominique Larntz * February 9, 2012
Injury Roadsong
Take your hand
and the rest of yourself
and hold me here
where I am mortal.
Tell me again
that you know
the same truth as I.
In youth, we have glimpses
of our singularities.
However, these injuries of age
engage a handsome brake
in our soul’s engine, giving us
our own acceleration rate
and there is no speed limit
imposed anymore.
I can finally slow down,
ignore the lines,
get off the road.
Poem: I Am Moss
0Dominique Larntz * February 8, 2012
I Am Moss
Tempted again to exacerbate my need
to reach heights I was never made to reach,
I would like to remind myself
that moss’s weathering process is what
made our earth’s atmosphere cool,
absorbing a planet’s worth of carbon dioxide
and cutting our temperatures in half.
In case I think I need to be seen from space
instead of cling to the solidity of rocks, let me
turn to the truth of what is right beneath me
and when I wonder why I can only breathe
at a lower altitude and why why I have to be
so low in this life when I would like to believe
I am as cherished as a begonia or a sequoia,
let me remember the security in being
close to the earth.
Let me hum quietly with
this feeling that forms
an intimacy with life,
more solid than a bloom
and more withstanding
than a tall tree trunk.
So it’s not attention I need to complete this mossy feat;
what I need is the transformation of heat into coolness
to form an atmosphere for evolution. We moss are making
the future environment with each of our small reactions
and our grounded and giving florescence.
Poem: Corporate Man
0Dominique Larntz * February 4, 2012
Corporate Man
He’s not thinking; he’s just working.
In the late middle of his shift,
he waves his hand and doesn’t look up
and a symphony of technology erupts.
He’s deeply inside his task
and does not appear to hear and see
the elegance or beauty or magic
in his newfound capabilities.
He doesn’t compute the trade-offs
from magical maneuvers like that.
He keeps the books abstract,
like the rest of the world,
while he depletes resources
without fully accounting for them
or understanding them
or listening to them.
After all, if you take them up
another taxonomy level,
aren’t cows and water
and silicon and human effort
all mere resources?
It’s that abstraction that allows
corporate man to lie to himself.
Pretty soon he will take off the smock
and the smirk that helps form the mask
that hides the constant limbic fear
that drives an existence spent
working working working
to dominate the efforts of others
so fully that he cannot even appreciate
total surrender so he has to kill off
even those who hold onto nothing.
Someday, that man will end his shift.
He will look up at the time, stretch and yawn.
He will gather up his things
and leave his workstation.
You have to wonder if he knows
what he’ll go home to.
Poem: Less is not more
0Dominique Larntz * February 3, 2012
Less is not more
The implication imp flutters around my day like cutting raindrops telling me I should, I could, I might, I would do more more more. There is something in me that is so simple, an umbrella of laziness, that is something other than peace–a defense mechanism of too many hours of television to fight this imp. Only the smallest tasks are done today. it is a mystery, because I am happy to do more.
Poem: Light Dreams
0Dominique Larntz * February 2, 2012
Light Dreams
In my recurring dream
I am a small angelic light
one of many embodied
at this time on this earth
to fulfill some purpose
maybe just to love a little
bit more today
Poem: A Little Physics of Preparation
0Dominique Larntz * February 1, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
A Little Physics of Preparation
The untied shoelaces of momentum
have me confused the past few days
as if I could run forward without
knotting up these sneakers.
There is a point in preparing
when you stop and crouch
to carefully tie your shoes.
If, instead, you slip your feet into
the rubber-soled foot skins
without taking the time
to loop over and under,
and to pull the ends together in a bow–
perhaps thinking momentum more important
than the feet doing the running
or the process steps themselves–
what clarity of experience you will miss
as you trip on the long untied strands.
Outfitted for excursion,
I am almost ready to go.
Poem: Simple Book Binding
0Dominique Larntz * January 31, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Simple Book Binding
Holes are made in the spine.
Push the point through
the outside of the fold
in the center hole
and then pull it inside through
to the top and count
the number of times
you have dreamed
of riding in a car with no driver
or of protecting others
from a mad killer on the loose.
Next tighten the thread
and pull the needle
through the center hole again.
Now push it into the bottom
and note the waking moments
when you screamed at a child
too near an electrical outlet
instead of picking her up
or covering up the plug;
or when you dated a boy
just to go to a spa and get
a 2-hour hot stone massage
knowing you didn’t like him.
Pull the thread back to the center
and knot the two ends together.
This is the simplest way
to bind a book.
Poem: Liar Butterflies
0Dominique Larntz * January 30, 2012
Liar Butterflies
I wonder sometimes
if the collective boom
of media lies
has the wing span
to cause the kind of winds
we saw last Spring
in this desert,
depleting our soil
even further
without any cause
for an increase
in water level.
Poem: Lung Cancer
0Dominique Larntz * January 27-29, 2012 * “Love Letters to My Body”
Lung Cancer
No one paid attention when I was getting dressed
so I put on my tap shoes and smoothed my finger
along the top convex toe after I laced them up
with a little girl’s satisfaction.
In the California desert hospital they
clack-tapped for each step I took
but my grandparents didn’t look once
at the shoes that were so shiny
you could hardly believe they were black.
Despite the widening volume
made by each of my footsteps
along the fluorescent-finished tile path,
the hallways and turns ended
in my great-grandmother’s hospital room,
as cramped and dark as a camera.
Lung cancer was somehow a conversation
my memory stumbled into focus.
Suddenly carpeted in my own invisibility
I had my first portrait of death, too warm,
and full of unopened windows
and plastic tubes I felt I should ignore
as if they were not there–
a stopping point I had not expected at all–
and dense panic in the breath of
my family’s unspoken grief.
An unmeasurable time later we left, and I pretended
this never happened. I did not ask
the thousand million questions a curious child
must have had after such a visit,
perhaps because a kind child
does not want to intrude upon growling adults.
I still don’t know if I felt unsafe
or if I did not know how to ask.
Perhaps there is a time for questions
and a time for toe taps–
and our best efforts to act just right
play very little part, despite
how we choose our shoes.
Now I can feel free to visit with these
serious pictures. The echo of spirited footfalls
linger in my memory sometimes
when I am as quiet and gentle
as a hibernating bear.
I can recall my eight year old girl’s
confusion at unexplained experiences,
and realize it would have been nice
to enjoy an adult narrator at the time.
Now, in middle age, I can project
what it might feel like to take a grandchild with you
on one of the last visits you will make
to your parent in the hospital.
What possible words could you tell a child
about the sacred bond between generations?
There are these inevitables–death and
hospitals and vulnerabilities–
that may shock and dislodge
a dancing, exuberant child
but they will not interrupt our steadier steps later,
when we place our toe gently and then our heel firmly
through the same age as our grandparents once walked.